“Good-bye,” he echoed, in his throat. “I am going away to-morrow, and I promise never to intrude myself upon either of you again.”
“'Good-bye?'--you said 'good-bye!'” Lionel suddenly sat up in his mother's lap and stared from his great, startled eyes, his beautiful mouth puckered up and quivering.
“Yes, I have to go away,” Galt faltered, his glance averted. “I only came to spend a short time at Stafford.”
“But you told me you never would go away from me,” the child persisted. “Don't you remember the day I fell and hurt my knee, and you washed it and put the medicine on it? Don't you remember you kissed me, and hugged me, and wanted me to kiss you, and said if I'd promise to be your little boy you would always stay with me? How can I be your little boy if--if you go off?”
The eyes of the mother and father met in the strangest stare that ever passed between two mortal creatures.
“I can always love you if I can't be with you,” Galt faltered, conscious of the emptiness of his words. “I can always love you and think what a plucky little boy you are, and--and--” His voice trailed away into nothingness. A sob rose in his throat and choked him.
“But I want you to _stay!_” The child was crying now, with his chubby hands to his eyes. Suddenly Dora, with a desperate movement, pressed him to her breast.
“You must not play on his feelings that way!” she cried, fiercely, casting a significant glance toward the town. “Go, please!”
He bowed low, a look of death on his face. She pressed the head of the sobbing child to her breast, and firmly held it there with her beautiful white hand. “Good-bye,” she said, with the dignity and calmness of an offended queen. “Good-bye--forever!”
He turned and moved away. A few paces from her, before the trees had obscured her from his sight, he looked back and saw her with Lionel in her arms. Her exquisite face was pressed consolingly against the golden head. She was whispering to the child and rocking back and forth, as if he were a babe on her breast.
|ON his left, farther away from the town, and about a mile distant, stood a small mountain. Dark-red as to soil, bristling with sandstone bowlders, sparcely grown with pines and thorny locust-trees, and gashed by rain-washed gullies, it rose majestically against the cloud-flecked blue of infinite space beyond.